The most successful businesses are those with confidence in their ability to store, access and use data effectively. Rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of storage, this view point looks at the data it holds and more importantly, what can be done with it.

This review looks at why small businesses need to stop being complacent about their networks and at what they can do to maintain their competitive edge as they follow the big boys down the route of increasing collaboration and other bandwidth-hungry applications likely to impact on network performance and availability.

Windows XP market share grows in January

Efforts to migrate customers are failing, according to latest data

Use of the ageing Windows XP platform grew in January, despite the cut-off date for the operating system being just two months away.

Microsoft will end support for XP on 8 April, but despite repeated attempts by the company to urge migrations away from the platform, the latest data from Netmarketshare.com shows use actually rose in the past month.

Data from January showed that 29.23 percent of machines tracked were using the 13-year-old platform, up slightly from a figure of 28.98 percent in December 2013.

But many appear unwilling to move, and numerous V3 readers have declared that they have no intention of migrating to a newer operating system, citing XP’s numerous benefits over other Windows alternatives.

The NetMarketShare data showed that use of Windows 8.1 is still only at 3.95 percent of the market, although this is up from December 2013 when it was 3.6 percent. The growth in Windows 8.1 was matched by a slight decline in Windows 8 from 6.89 to 6.63 percent between December and January.

Windows 7 remains the most popular operating system in use, with 47.49 percent of the market.